Art catalogue back in print after 30 years

SINGAPORE - Singapore pioneer artist Lee Man Fong's 100th birth anniversary may have come and gone quietly last year, but local art gallery Beyond Colours and Taiwanese publisher Art Book Company have jointly reprinted his 30-year-old art catalogue to mark the event.

The catalogue, titled The Oil Paintings Of Lee Man-Fong, contains some of his best 160 works done between 1929 and 1978. It had taken the late artist more than 40 years to prepare before he commissioned the Taiwanese publisher to publish it in 1984.

It includes a foreward by the late Chinese master Xu Beihong, who penned the 1,200-word essay for the publication after he met Lee in Singapore in 1941.

The catalogue has been a collector's item since all 2,000 copies of the first edition were sold within three years of its publication. Some of the artist's collectors had paid as much as $3,000 for a copy at antique book auctions.

One collector, Mr Putra Masagung, who donated Lee's 1958 self-portrait that is pictured on the catalogue cover to the Singapore Art Museum in 2005, said: "I owned many of the paintings in the catalogue and I am happy it is being reprinted at last."

A controversial painting Lee painted in 1975 showing two well-dressed Dayak women titled Sisters was among those featured in the catalogue. It was withdrawn from a National Arts Council's auction in 1992 after Lee's family members challenged its authenticity.

Beyond Colours gallery owner Michelle Loh, 50, who deals in Lee's paintings, among those of other Singapore pioneer and second- generation painters, said she wanted to reprint the catalogue as there had been frequent requests for it from collectors in recent years.

"The catalogue, with all the colour and black-and-white prints of the paintings and text in both English and Chinese, including Xu Beihong's foreward, were all edited by Lee himself," she added.

As the copyright of the catalogue belongs to Art Book Company in Taiwan, she says she had to seek the rights to reprint the volume from its publisher, Mr Ho Kung-shang, in June last year. She ended up publishing 1,000 copies of the second edition jointly with him.

Mr Ho, 76, who was in Singapore for the launch of the catalogue recently, said: "In the past, several collectors and publishers had contacted me for permission to reprint the catalogue, but none were really serious."

He remembered Lee as a truly great master and who was very concerned about quality. The artist also told him that he had ready materials for a second volume of the catalogue. But unfortunately, he died in 1988 at age 75 after the publication of the first volume.

"That second volume never saw the light of day," he said.

Lee was born in Guangzhou, China, in 1913. His businessman father brought him to Singapore at age three. He completed primary school at St Andrew's School and began painting in oil when he was 16. In 1932, when he was 19, he started work as an artist for a Chinese magazine in Indonesia, where he lived for the next 35 years.

While in Indonesia, he won a Dutch government art scholarship to the Netherlands in 1946. H returned to Indonesia six years later and became a leading artist in the country.

He was a court painter and the chief curator of the presidential palace's art collection in Jakarta during the late President Sukarno's rule. He returned to Singapore in 1967 after Sukarno's ouster from power. He spent the next 25 years in Singapore but died in Jakarta of kidney failure.

"Lee Man Fong is now recognised as a Singapore pioneer artist and his works will be shown at the upcoming National Art Gallery of Singapore," said Ms Loh.

The Oil Paintings Of Lee Man-Fong is available at Books Kinokuniya at $250, inclusive of GST

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